Applications that require or benefit from the capture of purchase information from Web pages have been developed in a number of areas. Some applications, for instance, aggregate purchase information from a number of different Web sites for a given consumer. Other applications gather purchase information from a given consumer's purchases over the Internet in order to build a profile of the consumer, which can be used for targeted advertising based on the user's profile.
The accuracy of information parsed from Web pages can be important in order to provide useful information about the consumer. Some methods and systems for parsing purchase information that are currently used are specifically tailored for each Web site from which purchase information will be parsed. These parsing systems and methods, therefore, will have a number of templates for parsing Web pages, with each template being designed for one specific Web page. This results in problems if the Web site to be parsed changes or if it is desired to use the method for other Web sites. In addition, it is common for parsing systems and methods to identify these Web pages to be parsed by specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL) information. A URL identifies a network path to a specific Web site. If this URL information changes, these parsing systems and methods might not work.
A need exists for a method and system for parsing purchase information from a Web page without the need for specific knowledge about the structure of the Web page.